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The early days of stereo (which is what you’re talking about, the recordings of 70s which aren’t using stereo as an “effect” almost universally have the vocals panned to the center. The old way to take the vocals out of a recording was to adjust how much of the signal present equally on both channels was allowed to be played) were all about two things: backwards compatibility with mono systems and giving people with stereo systems a recognizable effect no matter what goofy system they had.
Wild panning accomplishes both goals.
Studio engineering that used the stereo format to create the illusion of a room or capture the sound of the room the players were playing in wasn’t developed yet and came from the experimental stereo recordings that sound crazy now like silver apples of the moon.
CMV: Mono mix of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” is better.
One of the worst abuses of stereo in my opinion are old Beatles albums. Maybe cuz the tech was somewhat new they were playing far too much? Too much for me anyway
There’s actually a biological reason for this, believe it or not. Language and music “time share” many characteristics of both hemispheres of the brain. Language and music are processed in different hemispheres.
Read pages 20-26 of the book “How Music Really Works” by Wayne Chase. It breaks it down in detail.
What’s interesting is just how different the quality was of some of the stereo releases vs the mono bounces. For an example, the stereo HDCD version of Pet Sounds is a little wack, but even if you joined the two channels to mono it sounds a hundred times better than the shittastic mono release. Got to wonder if they optimized it for AM radio play the way that similarly awful sounding releases in the early 2000s optimized for iPod earbuds.
This is why, when it comes to old music, I always try to listen to it the way it was originally intended.
Pet Sounds, as beautiful as it is, was originally released in mono. It was mastered to be listened to in mono, at a time when stereo was mostly just a novelty.
It wasn’t until much more recently that they’ve taken those masters and created “real” stereo mixes from them. While they can often sound pretty good, they never quite reach the level of the best sounding mono mixes of the same material.
Just my opinion of course.
That may be a thing with some releases, but I’m convinced that the original pet sounds and even the MFSL mono release are very inferior to that one HDCD stereo release. Still I’m listening to in 16bit/44kHz form, but to me it sounds way higher fidelity and likely is closer to the source. I can pick out instruments and sounds that I didn’t hear in the other version.
In general though I find modern ‘remasters’ are horrible and compressed and I think it’s lame that services like Spotify usually have only the most recent (and therefore worst) version of a given album.
May the source be with you
Is that why some 00’s songs sound so compressed?
00s music sounds so shitty because that was when digital music first became a thing. People thought 128kbps bitrate MP3s were acceptable (until they hear that mp3 they got from KaZaa play over the PA at their wedding and realize it sounds like raccoons fighting in a trashcan).
No, like songs I listen to today on Spotify or from TV shows during that era sound weirdly compressed.
I think it’s the tendency of producers in that era, around 2000-2010 was peak Loudness War, and many albums were pushed into clipping. IMO it started getting better through the 2010s as the emphasis on radio charts started to wane and listening habits shifted away from earbuds and portables.
Wild guess but stereo equipment wasn’t a thing in households and it was a way to get the adoption going
It was the early days of a new technology and way of listening that was completely different compared to the past 60+ years of recorded audio. I guess as a more modern analogy it’s like those cheap 3D films at the height of the fad that felt the need to gratuitously shove objects directly in front of the camera to get the most out of the 3D effect.
Those were the better 3d movies because they at least felt like there was depth. Unlike those modern movies.
Just put it in mono. Now, how can I fix this infamous autotune trend?
this kind of comment just reminds me of how people used to complain about distortion on electric guitars when it was initially discovered/invented/popularized
Now, how can I fix this infamous autotune trend?
Instrumental-only music?
You mean quantized, snapped-to-the-grid instrumental music? Sigh.
there is plenty of non-quantized instrumental music if you’re willing to look, and even then dismissing all music doesn’t forego a strict grid (which in the modern day is simply a choice and artist can choose to make) is dismissing a massive body of work just because it doesn’t use a technique that you like
Dude/Dudette, it was just a gag comment. Not only am I not really dismissing a massive body of work just because it uses quantization, as someone who’s spent more than half his life writing software synthesis applications, I’ve literally made a career out of quantization.
That being said, music that is not quantized definitely has a more natural feel to it, although putting that “feel” into sequencing software is surprisingly difficult.
As a treble lover, I tend to have problems with low bitrate and lossily compressed stuff.
But from what I haveseenheard, as long as the quanta are fine enough, the resultant regenerated audio tends to be close enough to the original. Of course, the components of the sound card matter, when you get to extreme clarity levels, but I guess my ears are not fine enough for that.
Hey, if the grid is fine enough…
Quarter-notes lol
Brother it’s time to join us in the drum and bass camp
I second this motion. All in favour?
I’m in favor. Atmospheric / jazzy / “intelligent” drum and bass is amazing.
Just ignore that crap and put some real shit into your headphones. Like The Cramps - Songs The Lord Taught Us.
Play it loaded.
I just love this kind of personal recommendation instead of the same shit Spotify and every streaming/scrobbling service keeps recommending. Sure I will, thank you.
It was designed to show off stereo sound which was still fairly new at the time. I like the way those recordings sound actually.
Today’s music is digitally mixed on laptops and has zero dynamic range or feeling. Then again people listen on Bluetooth now so they are only getting 20% of the music anyways. Makes me very sad
2024 I finally tried some Bluetooth headphones after maybe 10+ years.
Still using SBC by default, still no duplex HD audio, and still static driver noise at idle.
What is even the point lol. SBC-XQ only solves the first problem which is still inferior to even the cheapest of quality 3.5mm cable.
Even my Nintendo DS sounds better and it’s limited to 32Khz audio lol.
Jeez, were one of the two devices 10 years old? That hasn’t been my experience for a long time (except the duplex audio issue. I can’t believe it’s still terrible.)
Then again, I mostly use BT for the convenience. Being able to do yard work with zero wires is amazing.
I wonder what you would think of LDAC if you’d ever try that
Tried it and still a big difference between plugged in with a nice dac
Let’s get you back to bed, Rick Beato.
Does make it easier to isolate vocals I guess
And instrumentals.
And vampires
They \just got stereo bakk then igth
The jump from mono to stereo made a lot of engineers’ heads spin. Then again, how many 100% perfect 5.1 albums have you heard?
Actually, I’ve listened to only three 5.1 remixes, all of them phenomenal albums to begin with, and their 5.1 jobs were pretty meh. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots came out pretty good, but mainly because they just fucked around and tried stuff.
Have you ever listened to Zaireeka appropriately? I haven’t, but that must be a headache to line up correctly.
I thought part of the point of Zaireeka is that it is impossible to get it exact every time, so every time you play it it is a unique soundscape.
It was a pain in the ass but me and a buddy got it working once. I was a young teen and this was long before weed helped me see more beauty in music, so I didn’t get much out of it, but as an adult it’d probably be different.
Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who produced Pet Sounds, was actually deaf in one ear. Despite that, he got along just fine in a monophonic world, but the switch to stereo completely left him behind. It was a huge change in how music was mixed.
And yet Pet Sounds (and even the contemporary stuff they originally recorded for SMiLE but never officially released) still sounds phenomenal to this day despite being in mono.
The man was a wizard.
There’s some cool 5.1 and even 7.1 stuff in classical music (I don’t have a a surround sound setup myself but I hear a lot of talk of it).
I hate the “spatial” mixes.
Sometimes they’re done really well, but most of the time it’s just putting different parts of the song in different areas and makes it sound “diluted”.
Like, the guitar is in front of you, then the bass is behind and to the left… why??
My understanding is that most (at least rock) music is mixed this way, just subtle enough to help your brain pick out instruments but not enough to consciously notice.
Music is mixed that way, but spatial then takes a hammer to that concept.
It takes away the single interwoven sound and imo sounds like different tracks being played on opposite sides of the room.
I usually try the atmos mix for an album if it’s available on tidal, and usually all it ever does is remove the punch from songs.
You’re missing a key ingredient: Lysergic acid diethylamide.
In all other circumstances I agree with you.
Lysergic acid diethylamide doesn’t fix a bad mix.
You can still hear all the separate instruments surrounding you on a good regular mix, all the spatial does is break the interwoven sound.
Lysergic acid diethylamide doesn’t fix a bad mix.
I mean… Have you ever listened to “Whole Lotta Love” or “Axis: Bold as Love” while tripping balls? Those panning parts are pretty wild.
It makes sense. I bet it’s super hard, especially at first.
It’s largely a headphone problem, at least for me. I can’t listen to a song where certain tracks are completely isolated to one ear. The audio doesn’t need to be mixed perfectly, but I need at least a little bit of each sound in each ear. Otherwise it’s too distracting. My brain hates it.
It’s supposed to sound like the band is in front of you on a stage. Not all mashed into one spot in the center of the stage. You should be able to close your eyes and picture where each drum is positioned. Where the before guitar players are standing. And you should be able to hear the shape of the room. Modern recordings mixed digitally can no longer do this. Then again if you’re streaming Spotify into Bluetooth your missing most of what’s there anyways.
has anyone tried out apple’s ‘spatial audio’ and how it compares to 5.1?
It does what it claims to do in that it makes the music sound like it’s coming from a set of speakers a few feet in front of you in a room that has poor sound deadening. I really tried to like it but it just sounds more muddled/is fatiguing for me.
Edit: I haven’t tried it on acid yet tho, maybe that would make it make sense.
Think this is more an artifact of the way vinyl records worked - since audio can be encoded in two channels via the way the needle moves in certain orientations
Urr, I don’t think that’s it. I’m not sure stereo sound for vinyls has ever worked so that something like this would be necessary, and it wouldn’t really make sense – why would they have to put vocals on one channel and instruments on the other?
A stereo vinyl player just has the needle moving up and down in addition to left and right, so that the left-right axis is the sum of the waveforms of both channels and the up-down axis is the difference – which means that a regular mono player can play stereo vinyls
